Notes on software development.
Mostly .NET, C# and game development using XNA.

May 5, 2012

Terraria, second encounter

Redigit, after some 3 months, appeared again on Terraria Online today with extemely intriguing private profile post, which says just "Planning something big..":

Despite all my respect for his courage, plain and somehow awkward honesty, I had a strange feeling about all that situation. And now that little post is a relief! Looks like Redigit just took a really big vacation with his family after that incredible pace from the moment terraria was released to Terraria v1.1.2. That's was just 8 months. Eight months!

I think he needed this time to evaluate current situation. I don't think he wanted to halt development in such a way. I think something went not so good within a team. Particularly Tiy (main spriter) left to potentially rival project Starbound. BTW Starbound site is updated today with new info (good coincidence for starting conspiracy theory). Also I have a feeling that Terraria main codebase was of a rather low quality (negative fact of rapid development), so it's harder and harder to add new features and fix bugs. Major refactoring would require significant amount of time, which is probably not worth it. Stopping project this way is also hurting his reputation seriously, I'm pretty sure he understsnd it even better than me, so there surely was some serious s**t which forced him to such decision.

Anyway, that happened and so be it. I'm just happy that Andrew didn't took a three year vacation, but just three months.

As for what he is planning.. I have no idea. For now I have just some guesses (in decreasing probability order):

"Teh final" big Terraria bugfix patch for 1.1.2 version, signed as final version;